WaPo journo shared drafts with sources

7/24/12 11:18 PM EDT

Forrest Wilder of the Texas Observer is out with a pretty damning report today about a Washington Post reporter who shared drafts of a story with his sources and subjects and even allowed them to suggest edits, some of which ended up in the article.

Before publishing his story about the effects of a controversial standardized test, Post reporter Daniel de Vise "shared at least two complete drafts of his article with [the University of Texas-Austin's] press officers and allowed them to suggest critical edits, some of which ended up in the published story, according to emails obtained by The Texas Observer through a public information request."

Post editor Nick Anderson stands by and defends the reporter, but even if De Vise's actions are within the realm of Post ethics -- and that is a big if -- the emails are pretty damaging:

"Everything here is negotiable," de Vise wrote to Tara Doolittle, director of media outreach at UT-Austin on March 5. "Help me out by not circulating this material very far and by stressing that it is an unpublished draft. If you or anyone at the university has any concerns about it, I implore you to direct them to me. I'm one of a very few reporters here who send drafts to sources!"

In another email, de Vise wrote that he's "never had a dissatisfied customer in this process. And that includes an article a few months ago about a school with one of the nation's worst graduation rates.”

Nevertheless, Anderson isn't the only one standing by De Vise. Kelly McBride, a senior faculty member for ethics at the Poynter Institute, has said that the emails "show is a very genuine effort on the part of the reporter to get not only the facts right but get the truth while remaining independent."

But this goes beyond getting the truth: UT officials wanted to scrub or alter quotes because they reflected poorly on the institution:

De Vise bowed to many of UT's demands. In the next draft that de Vise sent to UT on March 7, Ritter's quote critical of the CLA had been removed and her "palpable distaste" had been replaced with "reservations."

Our current policy doesn’t prohibit a reporter from sharing a story draft with a source, but we intend to tighten it to ensure that such instances are rare without dispensation from a top editor. The practice of sharing unedited, unpublished material with sources is something we discourage. From time to time, when a story is particularly sensitive, as some national-security pieces are, or complex, as some science and policy pieces are, it can be helpful to run some wording or sections of a story past a source. But we should do that only for the sake of accuracy.